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The Current Transcript for August 12, 2021

Host: Laura Lynch

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

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Prologue

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The general mood of the population is trauma, people are still in shock of what happened, and this one reminds us of what happened back in 2010.

NORA YOUNG: A president assassinated, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake and now a tropical storm. Haiti is struggling to cope as the tragedy is compound in that country. We'll speak to an aid worker in Port au Prince in about half an hour later this morning.

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Can we turn the most brutal thing that human beings do to each other, kill each other in wars and make it a little better? That idea that technological innovators must also carry a moral responsibility with them strikes me as being virtually unknown today.

NORA YOUNG: Malcolm Gladwell on where war, morals and technology come together. We'll revisit his conversation with Matt Galloway about his latest book called The Bomber Mafia. But we begin this morning with fears in Kabul. I'm Nora Young, in for Matt Galloway. This is The Current.

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As Taliban offers reassurances for women, Afghan educator warns words must be measured against actions

Guests: Ali Latifi, Pashtana Durrani

NY: America's 20 years of war in Afghanistan have come to an end the same way they began with Taliban rule. That's the sound of desperation, panic and sadness in Kabul, Afghans took off, overtook runways and some clung to aeroplanes taking off, trying to flee the country as the Taliban cement their control of the capital. Yesterday, U.S. President Joe Biden stood by his decision to pull out American troops.

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The truth is this did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated. So what's happened in Afghanistan? Political leaders gave up and fled the country. The Afghan military collapsed, sometimes without trying to fight, there is no chance that one year, one more year, five more years or 20 more years, the U.S. military boots on the ground would have made any difference.

NY: Now a new era in Afghanistan begins. For the latest on the ground. I'm joined by freelance journalist Ali Latifi in Kabul. Hello.

ALI LATIFI: Hello.

NY: So what's the mood like in the capital today?

ALI LATIFI: It's calm. It's quiet. People are getting more and more stores and more things are starting to open where people are going out on the street. Certain government officials have gone back to their work that the mayor of Kabul has gone back to work. The acting minister of public health has gone back to work. Traffic police are back out on the streets. Municipality workers are back out on the streets trying to clean the city. So things are every day moving a little bit more and more, hopefully towards normal.

NY: And what about the airport? What's happening? There are flights getting out.

ALI LATIFI: No, because the airport has essentially been, if not destroyed, it's been badly damaged because over the last few days, with so many people trying to get in and storming the airport, you know, airport workers said that, like the scanners were broken and the terminal was broken. You know, if you saw footage, people were hanging from what you call the thing that they push out to connect you to the gates. Yeah. That thing. And people were hanging from that. So there's you know, it's all out of desperation. And so that also means because so many people were massing towards the gates and into the airport there, that, you know, it was badly damaged.

NY: And what are we hearing from Taliban leadership about how they plan to transition into governing?

ALI LATIFI: Not so much yet. They have, you know, told government workers to go back to work, that they would give them a blanket amnesty, that, you know, things have to start to resume. They have told women that, you know, we want you within the government. So now it's a matter of, you know, how much they can reassure people and really actually, you know, implement these words. You know, can they make these words into a reality?

NY: And what are you seeing and hearing from women? Are they out in public?

ALI LATIFI: Some, yes, not not nearly as much as would have been normal. Some, you know, when you walk on the street, you'll definitely see some women. And you as I said, you see more and more as the days are going by. But it's still not anywhere near what it would be on a normal day in Kabul. I mean, even men, it's not anywhere near what it would be on a normal day in Kabul.

NY: I see. We're hearing reports the Taliban are going door to door looking for government employees, police and Afghans who work for foreign governments. What can you tell us about that?

ALI LATIFI: Those have been reports. They haven't been confirmed. They haven't been substantiated. And the Taliban did release a statement saying that, you know, no one is allowed to go door to door. If you do feel like someone has come to your door, you know, there are these numbers to contact to verify that it's us. But, you know, the Taliban have also started checkpoints to make sure that people who are travelling in vehicles claiming to be the Taliban are actually the Taliban. S, there's a lot of reports coming out, but they're very difficult to verify, but if they do pan out and if they do end up being proven, then again, you know, it will be another stain on the Taliban's record because it will come out as something where they're saying one thing and doing another. And so right now, the onus is really on the Taliban to prove that they can sort of accept. The current state of Avalon's aside and work within it, rather than trying to bend it to their will, you know, leftover from the 1990s,

NY: how do Afghans feel about President Ashraf Ghani leaving the country so quickly?

ALI LATIFI: There's a lot of anger that the former spokesman for the foreign ministry, he put out a statement online saying it's it's a shame, it's a treason. And a lot of people are really quite angry because they feel like he left the country in this awful situation without any explanation. And, you know, if he couldn't go out and make a statement on the first day, why not? You know, since he's been away now, since it's been, what, two or three days now, you know, he only released a Facebook post and nothing else. So people are wondering why he's not doing more, why he's not actually saying anything. But at the end of the day, if he doesn't manage to somehow change people's perception, the lasting legacy of his presidency will be losing, you know, more than two dozen provinces in just a little over a week and then just leaving without any word.

NY: Yeah, Ali, yesterday we heard U.S. President Joe Biden defend how the U.S. pulled out of the country. What are Afghans telling you about the U.S. troop withdrawal?

ALI LATIFI: I mean, at this point, it's kind of over and so people aren't talking about it as much, they're trying to figure out what, you know, the current situation is like and what will happen with the Taliban. But overall, people were just upset at the way it was handled. You know, they were upset that there was no guarantees, that there were no pressure or conditions put on the Taliban or on the former government, that there was no attempt at a real cease fire made and that, you know, Joe Biden has only grown more and more disdainful and vitriolic with his words.

NY: No one expected the Taliban to take control of Afghanistan this quickly. The U.S. spent over 100 billion dollars Canadian to train and equip the Afghan army and police. What happened with Afghan forces?

ALI LATIFI: I mean, it's not to say that the Afghan forces don't fight and that they aren't capable or they aren't dedicated. The thing is, is that there was so much corruption, you know, in within the the the security infrastructure of Afghanistan over the last 20 years, that, you know, the amount of money that should have reached the soldiers really didn't. Because everyone you talk to, you know, and this is something that I've been experiencing for 10 years, no matter what province you go to, if you talk to military, if you talk to police, they would have said we weren't paid, we didn't. We like for instance, we had to buy our own boots. Sometimes they would have to buy their own even their own bullets or their own guns or they would say, like the guns we asked for didn't arrive or they did. They weren't of proper quality. Or when we were in a bind and we were asking for assistance and air support and backup and these things didn't arrive. So a lot of things happened. And at the same time, the Taliban went on this rampage where they basically attacked the country from many different sides all at once.

NY: So former President Hamid Karzai, along with others, are said to be negotiating a transition of power with the Taliban. What can we expect to come out of that?

ALI LATIFI: That's the biggest question, because what people are hoping for is that even if someone like Hamid Karzai or Dr. Abdullah, who's still the head of negotiations, even if they're not necessarily the most popular or the most well-liked, just the idea of them being there and potentially people like them being in a future government will give people a little bit more comfort that, you know, the Taliban won't be alone and that they will be sort of confined by the presence of other more Democratic thinking people, you know who have been part of the republic, you know, the original some, you know, have been around since the original republic and the Islamic Republic also. That is something that people are hoping for so that at least within the government, there are people who have been part of democratic processes in the past.

NY: Thank you so much for your thoughts on this.

ALI LATIFI: Thank you.

NY: Freelance journalist Ali Latifi. Teachers and human rights activists are concerned about what quality of life lies ahead for Afghan women and children. They fear that hard won women's rights will be rolled back under the Taliban and their access to education, work and freedom of movement will be restricted. Last week in Herat, female students and professors were barred from entering their university after the Taliban seised control of the city and female staff were forced to leave a bank in Kandahar. Pashtana Durrani is the founder and executive director of Lern Afghanistan, a charity focussed on education in Afghanistan. She's also a teacher and she joins me now from Afghanistan. Hello.

PASHTANA DURRANI: Hi.

NY: So you're from Kandahar. Are you safe right now?

PASHTANA DURRANI: I am safe. I'm in hiding, so I cannot disclose my location, but yes, I'm safe.

NY: This isn't the first major withdrawal or the first Taliban takeover. What is different about this time?

PASHTANA DURRANI: See, this time the it's like, you know, in last generation, I was probably not even born, but for this one doctor, I was around three. If I'm not wrong, when the Americans came and they started with all this, the whole thing, and now post that now that we are in this transition period where the democracy, of course, it's not that strong, but a weak democracy still better than no democracy. Right. And at the same time, a lot of these rights that we gained through all these different international NGOs, all these different people that have been working in Afghanistan to make it a better place, I feel like those all things that are at risk. But at the same time, it's the normal civilians that are at risk. They feel lost, abandoned and confused. I mean, like the banks are not working. Can you believe it? People cannot withdraw money. What about if someone has to go to hospital? What if somebody has to do anything? So the reason is it's chaotic or like, you know, them leaving us is more chaotic because they didn't come up with a plan when they were coming. They just came. And now that they left, they also left without a plan. It's always with them being unorganised and like, you know, undisciplined.

NY: How are you feeling as you're watching this unfold?

PASHTANA DURRANI: I'm going to be honest, I cried my eyes out. I probably had, like, you know, swollen eyes on all my interviews because of all the tears that I had to shed. But now that I am like in a post that morning, now I'm thinking how to, like, push for a fight, how to ask for a statement. So right now I am more in a sense like, you know, in a combat position rather than in a fact that I'm mourning. Because right now it's not sufficient to be weak. Right now is not the time to let them take the charge. Right now is the time to put your foot down and fight for it, because if you don't speak now, you will never be able to speak again.

NY: We keep hearing them say that no one is going to get hurt, that women will be allowed to go to school. Do people trust that this will be peaceful?

PASHTANA DURRANI: It's peaceful in the sense that nobody's dying, right. But then in a sense, what is life without its rights, without its freedoms? For the fact that we have earned these rights, for the fact that we won't have the livelihood, we won't have access to all of these rights, then what is life without all these things?

NY: What are you hearing from students? Will they be able to keep learning? Do they have confidence they'll be able to keep learning?

PASHTANA DURRANI: For Herat, they didn't let the girls to go to the university. So I'm going to be honest, and that's not a very keen to say that, OK, we are very peaceful and we are going to accept girls into education and all that. But in Kandahar right now, the schools are closed, so I'm going to wait on how they react when the schools open in the next two weeks. So it's a confusing state. Where [unintelligible] last night said that we are going to let girls study, we are going to let them work. But then what sort of work are we talking about as they escorted women in bank to home that issue as the male family members to fill in for them? I mean, like someone who studied geography cannot come in and fill in for an accountant, right? So all these things that you have to understand that there are layers of what Taliban see and what they are putting in practise. What sorts of rights are we talking? What sorts of jobs are we talking? What about educational rights? Are you going to use Quranic or Islamic learning to be used as an alternative for general education? Are you going to use teaching as the only method and also Islamic teaching as the only profession that would be acceptable for women, or the health workers as the only profession acceptable for women? So you have to understand that these are all layers that need to be unfolded, that need to be asked, and we need to do this right now, because if we let it go, this is the moment, if we let it go, it's going to become chaotic, suffocating, as it has been in the past.

NY: But how do you do that? How do you confront that chaotic situation where it seems like there's not even a lot of plain information?

PASHTANA DURRANI: The I'm trying to get my words out. I have been doing this for the past full week and I'll continue to do so until we get a reply, because I am not the only one. There are many like me who are afraid to come out, or who don't have the platform. So it's either me talking or nobody's talking. Of course I don't want to say that 'Oh, I'm the only one,' like with a Saviour complex. And everything and everyone. There are a lot of amazing women who are doing amazing jobs and who are already doing an amazing job at raising awareness and fighting this fight. But for now, we need to highlight this issue and also ask the international community to pressure the Taliban into accepting the educational rights and women's rights as a whole, not just a few things, as a whole.

NY: I see on Twitter that you're facing a lot of trolls and a lot of pushback on on some of the narratives. Who are those people and what are they saying?

PASHTANA DURRANI: Say you'll always have opposition position. You can never be a prophet. And nobody, not everyone can accept you for the person you are or for the people that you work with. When I was working with girls even then, back then, we had a backlash for, like, you know, working with girls. You cannot just see that, OK, I'm working for girls is because it's accepted in the West and it's seen as a good thing. In our culture, in our country right now. We have been through four decades of war and there are people who are too scared to send their daughters to school. There are people who think it will make them infidels. Right. And there are people who just don't want to invest in girls. So you have to fight all those marriages. I'm not the only country that's fighting them. It's India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. All these people also have students who are not enrolled in school.. So we already have a backlash for that. And now you add Taliban apologists or on the top of that, you will, of course, have a lot of backlash. But for every man who is being a Taliban apologist who has access to that cell phone, there is a girl who doesn't have an access to cell phone or Internet, is stuck at home, and there are men deciding for her future.

NY: I mean, I take your point that there are other people speaking up, but what draws you personally to speak so publicly about this with with so many people afraid to speak up right now.

PASHTANA DURRANI: The fact that Afghan women have suffered in the past. And when I was a kid and my mother used to tell me that my grandmother used to like, you know, text me a lot, like, you know, to talk to talk about the fall of Nageeb and used to cry about it a lot. And then when I used to be a kid, we have the school at home. Right. So for me, everything was given to me on a plate. But for my grandmother, she had to abandon her house, she had to abandon her country. So for me, it's very important to understand that what I have, a majority of the women wouldn't. And it's important that I have the privilege of all this access to rights, so I should be using it and I should feel the responsibility for making sure that all these women access it. It shouldn't be something elite. Rights are for everyone, not someone who is an elite or a privileged person.

NY: So who do you blame for what's happening right now and what do you think needs to happen next?

PASHTANA DURRANI: Right now, I blame Ghani, his corrupt government, the West, for doing this because he was running and his government was too corrupt to like, you know, focus on focus on public administration, focus on girls, focus on-- and apart from that, I do you put the blame on the West because the West didn't like you know, the didn't stand by Afghan people, delegitimize Abdulhadi, made sure that everyone on the Doha deal is like, you know, given a free pass on whatever they do. And nobody was asked not to hurt the civilians. So, of course, I'm going to highlight that for a fact. These two parties were involved in legitimising a terrorist group.

NY: What does this mean for you? I mean, you're a young woman. Where will you go from here? Will you stay in Afghanistan?

PASHTANA DURRANI: Are for now asking for it. For now, I'm staying put. and I have to speak with I am not one person. I have 7,000 students, I have 30 principals. I have more than a few hundred teachers, who depend on me. So I have to stay put, I just can't abandon everything. So for now, yes, sticking to Afghanistan.

NY: Thank you so much for your insights on this. And please stay safe.

PASHTANA DURRANI: Of course, thank you for having me.

NY: Pashtana Durrani is an educator, activist and founder of LERN Afghanistan. The CBC News is next. Then.

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NY: It's as bad as January 2010. So says a man staring at the streets of his neighbourhood in Haiti in the aftermath of another devastating earthquake. The country is again struggling to cope. We'll take you there in six minutes. I'm Nora Young and you're listening to The Current.

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Haitians working to build resilience after successive crises

Guests: Muhamed Bizimana, Rose May Guignard

NY: Hello, I'm Nora Young and you're listening to The Current. Still to come, Malcolm Gladwell will explain what the bomber mafia was and the vision a group of Americans had for a more humane way of waging war. But first, to Haiti, coping with a political crisis. Violence in the streets and earthquake. And now a tropical storm.

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This is what's going on here, because there's people below the house, they are trying to save the life of these people to dig them out. This is a hotel.

NY: That's the sound of desperation in a country that's seen so much of it. Rescuers in Haiti digging in rubble for anyone left alive after a magnitude 7.2 Earthquake struck on Saturday. That was from a town called Les Cayes, very close to the epicentre of the quake. Perpetue Vendredi is there right now. She's the director of programmes operations for Save the Children in Haiti.

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What is going on now in [unintelligible] we have all these children and families yesterday because of this to get back inside for those that the house didn't collapse yesterday. What happened if all the children and their family that didn't have a full house to get inside yesterday night. They, some of them, don't know how it collapsed. Unfortunately, they had to make a risk analysis and say, is it worth staying outside with those children that could get sick or getting inside with all this fear that aftershocks could continue and take their lives.

NY: More than 1400 people are confirmed to have died. More than 6000 are injured and thousands are without shelter. It comes just a month after the Haitian president was assassinated in his home, leaving a leaderless nation and violence in the streets. And now on top of all that, a dangerous tropical storm is moving in on the island. Muhamed Bizimana is assistant country director for programmes with CARE Haiti. He's in Port au Prince. Hello.

MUHAMED BIZIMANA: Hello. Hi.

NY: So what are you seeing in Port au Prince today?

MUHAMED BIZIMANA: Today, everybody is still under panic. In our operational area, we see people very nervous. Most people have lost their homes. All the effort now is to secure an alternative shelter.

NY: And what are you hearing from staff in the areas that are most seriously affected?

MUHAMED BIZIMANA: We have our office in one of the heavily impacted region, the Department of Governance, where our staff have been involved in assessment of damages caused by the earthquake, but at the same time assessing the need for now critical needs are there. But the general mood of the population is trauma. People are still in shock of what happened. And this one reminds what had happened back in 2010 and in 2016. We need to highlight here that this particular region that has been hit once more on Saturday has been heavily affected by the event in 2010 and back again in 2016. It's a kind of a traumatic wounds on people's face in that particular region.

NY: I mean, while this earthquake is stronger than the one in 2010, it's further away from populated areas. So can you tell me a bit about who's most affected by this right now?

MUHAMED BIZIMANA: Indeed, this has been a more powerful earthquake than the one in 2010. The exception that this one is or has been localised in one particular region as opposed to in 2010, which affected most parts of the country, including the capital city, Port au Prince. For now, many of the areas in major towns in the south that are heavily populated have been affected. And most of these areas that are affected, it's where you find the most impoverished population, most poor and vulnerable groups in these particular localities. As you know, due to the poor economic capabilities, they can't afford homes that are built on standards to withstand strong and powerful earthquake like this one we experienced last Saturday.

NY: How hard is it to get resources to the people that need it the most right now?

MUHAMED BIZIMANA: For now, that is one of the main challenge, all of us, for example, our team on the ground has been relying on prepositioned emergency staff in our office there, but that one is kind of drying out very fast. And as you had mentioned, the country has been facing a series of crisis, the latest one being a security crisis that have seen the access roads from capital to this southern region completely cut off. So getting resources in terms of personnel, in terms of goods to this particular region is tough for now. And that is one of the main concerns of the humanitarian community.

NY: Can you tell me a bit more about how the current political situation is playing into rescue efforts?

MUHAMED BIZIMANA: For now, we've seen the government taking a centre stage and trying to coordinate efforts and try to set party, which is one of the good things compared to back in 2010. So for now, all the efforts seem to be focussed on the search and rescue missions and getting the first images out there, which is a good thing for now.

NY: What's needed from the international community.

MUHAMED BIZIMANA: Obviously, the international community solidarity is mostly needed at this time in all of our homes. As you know, we've been experiencing a series of crises. So there seem to be a competition across crises there's a need for immediate assistance, there's a need for technical support. And all the efforts are really welcome. I know, for example, our organisation was put out on the website. People can donate in any form they can, but at the same time, a more large scale humanitarian aid is badly needed here in order to respond to this particular crisis, as we do also continue to respond to pre existing crises.

NY: I mean, meanwhile, there's still the pandemic going on and Haiti's vaccine rollout began about a month ago. How do you think all this is going to impact vaccine rollout?

MUHAMED BIZIMANA: This vaccine, not just the vaccine campaigns or rollout have been just started, but at the same time the way continued efforts in terms of conflict prevention, sensitisation awareness raising. So for now, all our worries are that because of the magnitude of the destruction in this particular affected area and mostly in the densely populated neighbourhoods, that would create a kind of promiscuity that would be one of the factors that might see the prevalence of covid shooting up. So as we do think at for us, as we are planning our response, organising our response, we are ramping up also our covid prevention messaging, at the same time continuing our efforts to sensitise people for covid vaccine acceptance. So obviously this the crisis will delay a little bit. The effort in terms of might delay the efforts in terms of vaccination as all the health facilities are overwhelmed by injured people. But all efforts also are being put in place to continue at least the transition activities.

NY: Muhamed, thank you so much for your insights on this.

MUHAMED BIZIMANA: Thank you. Pleasure.

NY: Muhamed Bizimana, assistant country director for Programmes for Care in Haiti. Haiti has never fully recovered from the quake of the same magnitude that hit in 2010. That disaster left 220,000 people dead and prompted efforts to prepare the island for future earthquakes. But it has not been simple or easy. Rose May Guignard is an urban planner, resilience expert and the senior project manager at GOAL in Haiti. She was born there and educated in the U.S. She returned after the 2010 earthquake. Rose May Guignard is studying how to make Haiti more resilient to earthquakes. And she's in Port au Prince. Hello.

ROSE MAY GUIGNARD: Hello, Nora.

NY: So you returned to Haiti after the quake in 2010. What is it like to be living through this again?

ROSE MAY GUIGNARD: Well, it's the moment to take stock and make sure that we have learnt some lessons. Have we learnt some lesson? What are we putting in place? Are we ready for the storm? And from the point of view of building practises, what we can see is that we we still have a lot of steps in order to get into the resilience of building and resilience in Haiti in general.

NY: So what are you hearing about the situation in the hardest hit parts of the country?

ROSE MAY GUIGNARD: Well, this is a very hard situation. You know, this most people you used your previous interview to talk about this. We are in the middle of a multi layered crisis. And a lot of folks who live in the south, we're living in March and went back to this region after the 75 days now of crisis with gang activities. And so we have people returning home facing this crisis at home. This weekend was a major holiday in the south. So we have a lot of family returning to visit kinfolks and children spending the summer holidays and there they're facing this crisis. So this is a time. That is really wretched for a lot of folks asking for their family, the well-being of their family and all that, so so is a very, very difficult situation. And you have to remember, this happened five years after Matu and in Matu, you folks were really afraid of the storm and the wind. And when they rebuilt, I think many folks rebuilt in concrete not to have to live through that kind of experience with a hurricane. And now we may be facing the consequences of poor building practises when using concrete. So we are still in the early stages of evaluation, but numbers are coming in. We're very concerned that there are significant number of public buildings that have fallen, schools, churches, hospitals that have collapsed. So from that point of view, it's a big concern. And learning from too many, 10, 11 years later, there's a lot to be done in Haiti with the resilience of buildings.

NY: Can we get into that a little bit? How does what you're hearing and seeing today in Haiti compared to 2010?

ROSE MAY GUIGNARD: Well, in 2010, 2010 happened in Port-Au-Prince and Port-Au-Prince is densely populated and Port-Au-Prince has had a period of fast rise in between 1980 and 2010 and not a lot of control on building and the collapse of a building. There was a chain reaction to to many of the collapse in Port-Au-Prince at the time. In 2010, people were in shock because we had forgotten that Haiti is earthquake prone. So what you're hearing that in [unintelligible compared to to Port-Au-Prince and [unintelligible], when people realised that it was an earthquake, everybody left buildings. So so it was it's a good thing. So the messages people are understanding better and the reaction is better in that sense. But we still have a lot to do in construction system. And we have to really revamp our construction system. And we really need to put a systemic view on how how we build in Haiti, starting with training, studying with knowledge, but also making sure that we respond to finances, response to access to quality material and that sort of things.

NY: But do you think the government, the government is more prepared now than it was back in 2010?

ROSE MAY GUIGNARD: I think the government is showing a sign that it is in better control, that in 2010. They are sending the right messages, they are asking people to follow it through them. So you have a sense there's better come in. But the message of the prime minister was saying that we understand that aid is not arriving fast enough and that we are going to speed up a delivery. So I think we need to make sure that what we do is to reinforce what's going on at all levels of government, whether it's national government, but also local government, but also amongst community groups who are already created to respond to the kind of urgent need those group exist. And we need to reinforce them and we need to let them take the lead.

NY: And what kinds of things have you been working on to try to prepare and to get to that stage of resilience that you're talking about?

ROSE MAY GUIGNARD: So at GOAL, we are doing this best practise of study. We're taking stock of what have we done in Haiti in terms of response to natural disaster and making sure that we take stock of what works well. And, for example, what works well is working with community based organisation. What works well is bringing aid to where the needs are with communities. What works well is to making sure that in the approach you you you use what we call a neighbourhood approach. So we eliminate all the silos. It's not simply water and sanitation issue, but you have to think through water and sanitation, also with housing, also with access to road, also with increasing security at the scale of neighbourhood. And while you're doing it, you have to also think about market system. What are we disrupting market system or are we using community based group to do the work? And in that way they are able to strengthen leadership strength and capacity. So these are the type of things that we're learning with this study that we are writing about today to make sure that people uses what works well for Haiti. In Haiti, this particular earthquake is going to be hard because it's going to spend the length of the enormity of fault. And there are a lot of communities, small communities, along a line of about one hundred and forty kilometres, and these areas have traditionally been hard to access. So and we have to bring urgent aid to them today and we have to bring a recovery effort to them within two or three weeks or so. So these are these are real challenges. And all this is happening at the time of the teen phase of the hurricane season.

NY: Yes, a lot of challenges. Are there examples of best practises in terms of planning or construction techniques that you see need to be more rigorously in place?

ROSE MAY GUIGNARD: We have done a lot of training in the past 10 years, teaching folks at full scale of engineering from the day labourer to the senior engineer, how to to change what they're doing to make sure that concrete buildings can withstand an earthquake. And traditional building also are solid building. What we're seeing is that most of our effort really concentrated in the metropolitan area and we need to scale up this effort nationwide. And I really hope 11 years later we can all say clearly, Haiti is a seismic prone country. We have to build better and we are going to put in place all the the practises, all the system in subsystem necessary for to transform how we've been building to today.

NY: What now? How do you see the immediate priorities for the country?

ROSE MAY GUIGNARD: The immediate priority today is really to to do rescue and to to bring aid to the hospitals, the hospitals, small. They don't have any material. There's no doctors. That's today's the real priority; rescue effort.

NY: And what about long term?

ROSE MAY GUIGNARD: Long term effort? And I think there are things that are konik in Haiti. Well, I've spoken at length about building practises, but we're also in the country that have had serious food insecurity. Issues in the this region is really the the basket of the metropolitan area in many ways. So we have to think through about all the disruption happening in the market system coming out from this region to Port-Au-Prince and making sure that we we apply the levers where they are needed, making sure that the producers do not lose what they have in these goods, are able to reach the big marketplaces. And you know, and we know we've seen the satellite images. There has been a lot of major landslides. So so which means that we're going to have connectivity issue and disruption of market systems. The other thing that that we have to really keep an eye on with the landslide, we are going to have issues with flooding in places that are not traditionally flooded. So everybody needs to be on the lookout and studying imagery and trying to to prevent and do the prevention for communities around these new areas that are now prone to flooding.

NY: A lot of work ahead, Rose May, thank you so much for your thoughts on this.

ROSE MAY GUIGNARD: Thank you, Nora.

NY: Rose May Guignard is an urban planner and resilience expert in Haiti. Melissa Laveau was born in Ottawa to Haitian parents and found herself yearning for a deeper connexion to Creole history and culture. Her twenty eighteen album was a restyling of traditional Haitian folk songs. It celebrated the island's history, culture, language and struggle for freedom. This is Nan Fon Bwa book by Melissa Laveau.

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[Song]

NY: That is Melissa Laveau with Nan Fon Bwa. Coming up after your regional update.

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It's about technology, it's about morality, it's about an eccentric genius's. It's about men who are trying to bring morality and technology into some kind of harmony.

NY: finding a way to wage war. But less brutally was the mission of the bomber mafia of World War Two. Malcolm Gladwell explores their past and how the lessons they learnt apply in the present. In his newest book will revisit his conversation with Matt Galloway in 90 seconds. I'm Nora Young and you're listening to The Current.

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Malcolm Gladwell on the firebombing of Tokyo and his book, The Bomber Mafia

Guest: Malcolm Gladwell

NY: Hello, I'm Nora Young and you're listening to The Current.

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NY: Still to come, Malcolm Gladwell will explain what the bomber mafia was . And the vision a group of Americans had for a more humane way of waging war. But first, to Haiti, coping with a political crisis, violence in the streets, an earthquake and now a tropical storm.

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NY: I'm Nora Young, sitting in for Matt Galloway, and this is The Current.

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MALCOLM GLADWELL: As a little boy lying in his bed, my father would hear the planes overhead on their way in. Then in the small hours of the morning, heading back to Germany.

NY: Malcolm Gladwell, whose father was five when the Second World War began. He lived in Kent, England, in what was known as Bomb Alley. It was along the Germans flight path to bomb London, and when a plane had bombs left over, they would drop them anywhere on their return flight.

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MALCOLM GLADWELL: One day, a stray bomb landed in my grandparents back garden. It didn't explode. It just sat there, half buried in the ground. And I think it's fair to say that if you were a five year old boy with an interest in things mechanical, a German bomb sitting unexploded in your backyard would have been just about the most extraordinary experience imaginable.

NY: Malcolm Gladwell heard this story from his dad when he was a young child, and it sparked a fascination with war and bombs. But with the many best selling books he's written, he'd never written one on this subject until now. Well, we just heard the opening of his new audio book and book, The Bomber Maffia: A Dream, A Temptation and The Longest Night of the Second World War. It's a compelling part of history that looks at war and morality. And as he says, it's a story worthy of his obsession. Matt Galloway spoke with Malcolm Gladwell earlier this year.

MG: Malcolm Gladwell, good morning.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Good morning, Matt.

MG: Just briefly, what do you remember about those conversations with your dad about Bomb Alley? And I mean, what did those conversations do for you?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, just the image of an unexploded bomb in your backyard is just so extraordinary. I mean, you know, I spent my childhood in southwestern Ontario. There were no unexploded bombs in the backyard of Ontario. So, I mean, this is such a kind of I mean, it's just incredible, like something out of a science fiction novel, you know? So it just seems so fantastic.

MG: What is it that makes this story worthy of your obsession?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, the story of The Bomber Mafia is about many of the things I've been interested in my entire life as a writer. It's about technology, it's about morality, it's about eccentric geniuses. It's about men. In this case, all men who are trying to bring morality and technology into some kind of harmony and that, you know, that kind of task is the kind of thing that I think I've returned to again and again. It's not just that they were a group of brilliant engineers. They were a group of brilliant engineers who had a moral vision. And that's fascinating to me.

MG: Who were the bomber mafia?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: The bomber mafia were a group of pilots in central Alabama in the 1930s who became obsessed with the idea that bombers, which were... bombers, were a new thing. You know, the aeroplane was brand new, but the idea that you could build an enormous aeroplane that could carry bombs was a, you know, a brand new idea in the 1930s. They got it in their minds that this thing called the bomber could revolutionize warfare, could make every other part of fighting a war obsolete. And not only that it could make war better, that you could wage a war without having to destroy your entire enemy's country, without having to kill civilians by the hundreds of thousands, without having the bloody carnage of the First World War. They thought they had solved the problem of war. And they bring that vision into the Second World War. And my book is about the story of what happens when that incredibly idealistic vision meets the realities of conflict.

MG: They were able to to have that vision in part because of one invention, the Norden bombsight. And I mean, I remember you did a TED talk about this years ago, but what is this thing? Briefly describe what this thing is.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: The Norden bombsight is one of the most bizarre and fascinating. It's an analogue computer designed and engineered by a man named Carl Norden, who was this eccentric Dutch genius who convinced the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force that his analogue computer could solve the problem of how to drop a bomb with precision. So think about it. Dropping a bomb from 20,000 feet when your plane is going 150 miles an hour and there's wind and the temperature's rising and falling and the enemy planes are attacking you, dropping a bomb with any kind of accuracy, is an insanely difficult physics problem. He thinks he's solved the physics problem with this contraption that he's built. And the U.S. military spends almost as much on Norden's contraption as they do on the Manhattan Project. So they spend billions of dollars developing this contraption because they think, wait a minute, if we can drop a bomb with absolute accuracy. And Norden said you could, he said you could put a bomb inside of a pickle barrel from 20,000 feet. You think then you can win a war, right? You don't have to... you can go fly over your enemy city and you can take out the power plant. You can take out the aqueduct. In fact, that bomber mafia did a famous scenario where they imagined, could Canada defeat the United States with a single attack on New York City using the Norden bombsight. And their answer was they thought they could just take out the bridges around Manhattan, take out the power plants, take out the aqueducts, and there would be no electricity, no water and no way to get off the island. And America would cry uncle, that was the Bomber Mafia's notion. So they think that this device solves this problem and makes air power the only thing that matters.

MG: How successful was the bomber mafia equipped with its Norden bombsight during combat in Europe?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, they tried really, really hard. The story of the first few years of the Second World War is the story of the bomber mafia ascends to positions of great importance in the U.S. Air Force. They're running the show in Europe and then later running the show in the Pacific Theatre. And they try over and over and over again to pursue this more humane form of bombing while the British, in great contrast, look at the Americans and roll their eyes and say,no, no, no, the only way to defeat the enemy is to bomb everything in sight. You know, what are you playing this game of trying to be accurate for? It's crazy. It doesn't work in the beginning. But the bomber mafia doesn't give up and it is that perseverance that drew me to the story,

MG: Can you qualify the phrase that you just used a more humane form of bombing? I think a lot of people would hear that and think, hold on, you can't have a humane, a more humane form of bombing.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, think about the Blitz. The Blitz is the German Air Force. The Luftwaffe attack on London in 1940 is an example of the conventional strategy of what's called area bombing or carpet bombing. You send as many planes and bombers as you can over an enemy city. You drop as many bombs as you can and you're not really even aiming. You're just dropping bombs on everything in sight because you can't hit them. You can't say I want to hit St. Paul's Cathedral. There's no way you can be sure that your bomb will find its target. So what you do is you just drop thousands of bombs and just say, I'll just destroy whatever I can in this kind of like I say, I'm going to carpet the city with bombs. That's why it was called carpet bombing. The Bomber mafia said, well, let's send one bomber over London. And if we think that we would like to destroy 10 Downing Street and leave everything else intact, let's just aim for 10 Downing Street. We don't need to kill 40,000 civilians. We can kill just everyone who's in 10 Downing Street. Right. So that was their... notion was we're still going to kill people, but we'll kill six people instead of 40,000.

MG: And even if you kill 40,000 people. I mean, with the Blitz, the blitz didn't break Britain, right? I mean, it did not break the spirit. Of those who were there.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah, this gets into this whole other argument the bomber mafia had with the British, the British lived through the blitz when a full scale German air power assault on London did not break the will of the British people. And the British then turned around and tried exactly the same failed strategy on the Germans and the Bomber mafia would say to them, what are you doing? You know, from personal example that just wantonly bombing the enemy doesn't work. So why are you trying the same crazy, incredibly immoral strategy on your enemy? And the British would have none of that argument.

MG: One of the godfathers of the bomber mafia is someone named Haywood Hensell, who is sent from Europe to the Pacific and gets the order to firebomb Japan. Who is he and what does he do when he gets that order?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Haywood Hansell was one of the leaders of the bomber mafia. So this group of idealistic young men who come out of Alabama in the 30s and he is... comes from a long Southern military family. And you can imagine he's one of those kind of... his favourite book is Don Quixote. Which tells you, by the way, everything you need to know about him. He once said he was gone from home so often on various missions that once he was at home and he heard a noise and he turned to his wife and he said, what's that? And she said, That's your son. That was it. They had a baby boy who he'd never heard cry before. He is this kind of extraordinarily romantic figure who would sing to his men Broadway tunes over the bomber intercom on the way back from missions over Germany. He was the most passionate believer in this extraordinarily quixotic notion that you could reform warfare. And he managed to convince the higher ups in the US military to believe in this vision. And he serves first over Europe, where he fails really to kind of enact this humane bombing. But then he gets assigned to the Pacific Theatre and he's the one who begins the bombing attacks on Japan in 1944. And he says he is told by his superiors, give up on this humane form bombing. We want you to take napalm, because napalm was developed in Harvard University for the purposes of bombing Japan because it was the most powerful incendiary device ever developed. They said take the napalm and burn down Tokyo and he won't do it. And he says, no, no, no, I'm doing it my way. I'm going to do this precision bombing and just take out the factories that are crucial to the Japanese war effort. He tries and it fails. He tries and it fails and he tries and fails. And finally, they have enough back in Washington. And that triggers one of the most consequential moments in the Second World War.

MG: Which is the replacement of...

MALCOLM GLADWELL: The replacement of Haywood Hansell with a man named Curtis LeMay who had no such qualms about burning down the cities of his enemy.

MG: This is a little bit of Haywood... of Curtis LeMay, pardon me from your audio book. It's archival tape.

CURTIS LEMAY: Look, the idea was they found the ball bearing plants over there are some of these swivel chair target analysts back in the Pentagon, and the idea was if we knock out that plant, which supposedly had the bulk of the ball bearing production in the country. The war would grind to a halt because there were no bearings. The plan was OK. Well, basically, OK, but here we are trying to find something to win the war the easy way around there ain't no such animal.

MG: He's talking about swivel chair analysts, which is a great turn of phrase. How does he view the bomber mafia and what does he think in terms of how war should be waged if it's not through this kind of precision bombing?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yeah. So playing that tape, this is a good reminder about why we spent so much time. We spent months on the audio book because in order to understand Curtis LeMay, you have to hear his voice. So imagine a bulldog of a man with a cigar in his mouth at all times and that kind of no nonsense, blunt, unsentimental approach. LeMay was this brilliant general who was one of the most ruthless military leaders of the entire Second World War. And he listened to this dream coming from the Haywood Hansell's of the world. And he thought it was nonsense.

MG: He's not singing show tunes to his...

MALCOLM GLADWELL: He doesn't know what a show tune is. He was famous. LeMay goes on to have this glittering career through the Cold War. He's famous for saying almost nothing. He once attended a three hour military briefing before the Bay of Pigs invasion. When he was running the Air Force. He said nothing for three hours, got up at the end, looked at the people who had briefed him and said it won't work, put his cigar back in his mouth and left the room. That's who we're talking about here. Right. So LeMay is someone who thinks the best way to fight a war is to be as brutal and as ferocious and as unrestrained as possible. So the keys get handed from the romantic Haywood Hansell to this warrior in Curtis LeMay. And LeMay goes to Japan and he says, I had this weapon, Napalm, which is the most incredible incendiary device ever, ever developed. And I have a country which is built entirely of cities made out of wood, which is what Japan was in the 1940s, little houses built very close together, all made out of wood and tar paper. And he says they will go up like a tinderbox if I dropped napalm on them. And he proceeds over the summer of 1945 to burn 66 Japanese cities to the ground. It's a part of the war that gets far too little attention. It's what happens when a man without any kind of notion of moral restraint takes over. And he does this that summer of 45, it's I mean, it's this I don't even know how to make sense of it. In fact, I struggle in the book to make sense of it. He's off by himself thousands of miles from Washington. No one's really looking over his shoulder or telling him what to do. And he has it in his head that the only way that Japan will ever surrender is if he burns the entire country to the ground and he sets out to do that.

MG: How did he justify that? I mean, there's hundreds of thousands of civilians who are killed in these bombing raids, in the firebombing of Tokyo. How did he justify that?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: He probably kills close to a million people in the summer of 45. He justifies it by saying the best outcome for all involved is for the war to end as soon as possible. And the best way for me to end the war with Japan as soon as possible is to burn every building they have to the ground, incinerate everyone I can. Just to give you a sense... the details of this, this is the end of the book when I discuss this murderous rampage through Japan in 45. After the initial napalm attack on Tokyo in 1945, when the American bombers landed back in Guam, which was their lunch spot, the smell of burning bodies was so overwhelming they had to fumigate the aeroplanes. Right. This is what we're... they burned 16 square miles of Tokyo to the ground in the space of five hours, killed probably 40 to 50,000 people. He did this every night, not every night, but, you know. Throughout the summer of 45, again and again and again and again, sending these hundreds of planes. Thousand miles over the ocean, from Guam to Japan to do the same thing, to burn people alive. You know, it's. That's you know, that's where you end up when idealism fails.

MG: Why hasn't that received the kind of historical attention that the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki received?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: I don't know. I think we have this notion that dropping the nuclear bomb on those two cities was somehow worse than what they did. And it's not. What LeMay did is, at the very least, just as bad. And I would argue in some ways worse. You know, the atom bombs destroyed two cities, LeMay destroyed 66. So he was ahead by 64. And the atom bombs at least had a kind of clear military rationale, which was it was a bomb so horrifying and so overwhelming that we felt it really would push the Japanese to surrender. What LeMay was doing didn't push the Japanese to surrender. He kept doing it and they kept fighting. So I have some real difficulty with... much as I understand his rationale, I have difficulty with him as I think anyone ought to.

MG: There are two questions that come out of this book. One is, and you've hinted at this, what does it mean to be moral in a modern world? That's something that you ask in the book. What does it mean?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: It means to ask the question, so the reason I think Haywood, Hansell and the bomber mafia are so important is that they are the people who bring about a technological revolution. They introduce a whole concept of fighting a war, of using air power and this kind of strategic way. But they're not content with being military innovators. They also ask a parallel moral question, which is, can we use this new technology in a way that benefits mankind? That is to say, can we turn the most brutal thing that human beings do to each other, which is kill each other in wars and can we make it a little better. And that idea that technological innovators must also carry a moral responsibility with them is something that is second nature to the bomber mafia and which strikes me as being virtually unknown today. You know, Mark Zuckerberg, I don't think... I don't know, but I don't get the sense that he is losing sleep at night over the moral implications of Facebook. The bomber mafia did lose sleep over the moral implications of what they were doing. They put their careers on there, on the line. And in fact, many of them Haywood Hansell, his career in the military was over because he kept pushing this dream of a better war and failed. He sacrificed his career for this dream. That's such a rare. Today's version of the bomber mafia would just say we found a way to kill people more efficiently and leave it at that. I don't think they would have asked that question. And that's why I think this story is important to tell, because it's a reminder of the responsibility of innovating.

MG: Well,[inaudible] their part. I mean, you mentioned Zuckerberg. It feels like a parable around again how technology, as you say, slips away from its intended path.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Yes, that's very much what... I felt like there was a reason to do this story book and write this book now.

MG: Do you feel... I mean, I find it hard to believe in some ways that you don't know Mark Zuckerberg, but you really think that he doesn't lose any sleep over what he created ostensibly with the best of intentions, has unleashed on the world?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: I mean, I don't know the man I know people in that world, I don't they lose sleep over that. I mean, I think I don't mean to say that he doesn't want to do good in the world because he does give away, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars to worthy causes. But I don't think... I think you would have difficulty convincing him that Facebook was, on balance, a bad thing. I think he would say, no, the good outweighs the bad. And maybe he's right. But that's a very different approach, weighing that kind of cost benefit calculus than the bomber mafia, who I believe were explicitly motivated by the idea that they could reform warfare. That's what got them started in the first place. They approach this with this moral intent. Whereas in Silicon Valley, I think you start by asking the question, can I make a lot of money? Which is a different question, right?

MG: Let me end where we started in the last couple of minutes. This is a book that you say that comes out of an obsession that you had. What are you obsessed with these days?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: What am I? Well, in my upcoming season of revisionist history, I have not one, not two, but three episodes on the Disney movie The Little Mermaid.

MG: Excuse me?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: I am absolutely telling you the truth.[Laughter] I have become convinced the worst movie of all time. And so what I did is I put together a whole team of people and we fixed The Little Mermaid. It is perhaps the most bananas thing I've ever done on revisionist history, but we are enormously proud of it. And at the end, we perform our version of The Little Mermaid in the final episode. And I will tell you that if you listen to our version, you will never look at the original again, in the same way.

MG: There's an origin story there that you probably can't tell in 90 seconds of how one becomes obsessed with The Little Mermaid. But can you hint at that?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Well, I never saw it as a child. I was spared by my parents never having to watch television. So I watched it for the first time as an adult like three months ago. And I was like, are you kidding me, this movie? And then I started calling up all these people who shared my.... it's like the worst movie in the world. I was like, I can't believe we're letting little children watch this thing. So then I became determined to fix it. And we do. We fix it on revisionist history. So watch out for that.

MG: The worst movie in the world. Malcolm, it's great pleasure to talk to you as always. Thank you very much.

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Thank you, Matt.

NY: Matt Galloway speaking with Malcolm Gladwell in April. And those revisionist history episodes that bashed The Little Mermaid only to remake it in the style of Mr. Gladwell himself. Well, they've since been released. Take a listen to what it sounded like.

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VOICE 1: It's time to raise the curtain. Are you sitting comfortably? Then let's begin. We're in the story's final act. Ariel had hoped to win the heart of the handsome Prince Eric, marrying him was the only way she could stay human. But the prince has chosen to marry another woman who is actually the sea witch Ursula in disguise. The soon to be newlyweds are on a boat. There are guests, music, dancing, all manner of merriment. And into the spectacle comes our Bad ass Ariel. So with that, may I present The Little Mermaid 2.0, written and narrated by Brit Marling.

NARRATOR: Ariel grabs onto a portal window, she hoists herself out of the seat, scales the side of a ship toward the deck. The final bars of Canon in D float down from above as Ariel ascends.

VOICE 1: Do you, Prince Eric, take Ursula to have and to hold in sickness and in health for as long as you both shall live?

NARRATOR: Ariel throws one leg over the starboard railing. The guests, enraptured by the perfection of the bride and groom, don't even notice her arrival. Eric looks deep into Ursula's eyes, hypnotised.

ERIC: I do.

VOICE 1: And do you, Ursula, take Prince Eric.

NARRATOR: Ariel soaking wet, wreathed in seaweed, red in the face, charges forward, leaps onto the stage, heads right for the couple to be like a charging bull, the guests gasp. At this invasion, a scorned woman come to sabotage the wedding to throw Eric's fiancee overboard. Ariel barrels forward, arms outstretched. And just when it seems like Ariel might strike Ursula, she collides with her in an embrace full of feeling. The guests jaws drop.

VOICE 1: God in heaven.

NY: That is just the beginning of the retelling of The Little Mermaid on Malcolm Gladwell as podcast Revisionist History. It was written and narrated by Brit Marling with a number of voices you might recognise, find it in full wherever you get your podcasts. Well, from the fantasy world of The Little Mermaid, I have to bring you back to reality. And reality can make us all uncomfortable, especially right now. Wildfires are raging out of control. Thousands of scientists have issued yet another dire report on the state of our climate. And we've just lived through the hottest month on record ever. After years of predictions, climate change is beginning to bite and it's making a lot of people feel anxious and hopeless. We'll hear about those feelings and how to deal with them later this week.

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With climate change, it's being recognised more and more as a health emergency, but that does largely focus today on the physical health aspects. But every one of us is going to have to grapple with a changing climate, a changing world. And, you know, we need to start thinking about how do we support people to process these understandable but difficult emotions, everything from anger, despair, fear, anxiety, grief, loss. And to see that as much as we, you know, are losing things and have things to grieve and be angry about. There is still hope and there is still a lot that we can do if we help people to translate those emotions into action, which can support their own mental health and wellbeing as well.

NY: Coming up this week, my conversation about climate anxiety with Emma Lawrence, a neuroscientist and lead of climate cares at Imperial College London. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Toronto based opera company Tapestry Opera has found a way to stay creative and connected to the community during the pandemic. Tenor Asitha Tennekoon will speak with Ali Hassan about performing box concerts at private homes, care facilities and retirement homes. I'm Nora Young. Thanks for listening to The Current.

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Tuesday 17 August, 2021

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